Monday, October 7, 2013

Empathy Gap...Rich People Just Care Less

Social distance makes it all the easier to focus on small differences
between groups and to put a negative spin on the ways of others and a
positive spin on our own. Freud called this “the narcissism of minor differences.” (Daniel Goleman)

"A growing body of recent research shows that people with the most
social power pay scant attention to those with little such power. This
tuning out has been observed, for instance, with strangers in a mere
five-minute get-acquainted session, where the more powerful person shows
fewer signals of paying attention, like nodding or laughing.
Higher-status people are also more likely to express disregard, through
facial expressions, and are more likely to take over the conversation
and interrupt or look past the other speaker.

Bringing the micropolitics of interpersonal attention to the
understanding of social power, researchers are suggesting, has
implications for public policy.

Of course, in any society, social power is relative; any of us may be
higher or lower in a given interaction, and the research shows the
effect still prevails. Though the more powerful pay less attention to us
than we do to them, in other situations we are relatively higher on the
totem pole of status — and we, too, tend to pay less attention to those
a rung or two down. A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in
pain. In 2008, social psychologists from the University of Amsterdam
and the University of California, Berkeley, studied pairs of strangers
telling one another about difficulties they had been through, like a
divorce or death of a loved one. The researchers found that the
differential expressed itself in the playing down of suffering. The more
powerful were less compassionate toward the hardships described by the
less powerful."